Message from the Workshop Chairs

Ji-Jiang Yang, Tsinghua University, China
Yuuichi Teranishi, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan
Dave Towey, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China
Sergio Segura, University of Seville, Spain

It is our pleasure to hold the workshops of the 44th IEEE International Computer Software and Application Conference, COMPSAC 2020 as a virtual, all-digital conference, with the theme of Driving Intelligent Transformation of the Digital World. Despite the world-wide COVID-19 outbreak situation in 2020, many research papers are submitted and presented in COMPSAC 2020 symposia and workshops. This year the COMPSAC conference includes 26 workshops covering different aspects of developing computer software and applications.

The workshops nicely complement the main conference symposia, together creating an exciting scientific program. COMPSAC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for the exchange of ideas and results in different areas of computer software and applications.

A significant contribution to the workshops comes from the main research focus of COMPSAC, especially along the software engineering and development aspects. There are six related workshops: “Quality Oriented Reuse of Software (QUORS)”, “Software Engineering for Cloud and Edge Computing (SECE)”, “Software Engineering for Smart Systems (SESS)”, “Security Aspects in Processes and Services Engineering (SAPSE)”, “Software Test Automation (STA)”, and “Security, Trust, and Privacy for Software Applications (STPSA)” contributing to about quarter of the accepted papers in the workshops.

In response to the digital world transformation theme this year, i.e., Driving Intelligent Transformation of the Digital World, five workshops are proposed: “Big Data Computation, Analysis, and Applications (BDCAA)”, “Deep Analysis of Data-Driven Applications (DADA)”, “Distributed Big Data Management (DBDM)”, “Secure Digital Identity Management (SDIM)”, and “Social Network Computing and Big Data (SoNeC)”. The workshops with related scope such as “Advances in AI and Machine Learning: Research & Practice (AIML)”, “Smart Computing & Applications (SCA)” also successfully contributed to the sessions in the workshops. These workshops have contributed to about quarter of all workshop sessions.

Needless to say, emerging technologies, networking, and applications form the third pillar in COMPSAC tradition with about half of the contributions.

We are pleased to report that the workshops in COMPSAC 2020 are well-balanced as well as highly interesting. We believe that the topics covered by the workshops are closely related to those contained in the main conference and hope that participants can benefit and stimulate new research ideas and approaches.

This year we received very large number of papers submitted to the workshops. The total number of accepted papers in all workshops is 113.

There are two major paths for contributions to workshops. The standard contribution path follows a direct submission to the workshops in response to the worldwide Call for Papers. Each paper submission undergoes a rigorous review process by at least two independent reviewers. This year we received 103 papers submitted to the workshops and 79 high quality papers were selected for presentation (acceptance rate: 76.7%).

Owing to the low acceptance rate in the main conference, some papers receiving highly positive reviews, but unfortunately cannot be accepted due to acceptance rate limitation, were referred to workshops for consideration. These papers had already undergone a rigorous review process and workshop organizers would ensure that they fit into the theme of the workshops, before they can be formally accepted for presentation. This year 34 papers were transferred from the main conference to the workshops.

We hereby thank all authors who submitted papers to the workshops for their support of the conference. Selection process was carefully carried out by the workshop organizers. We would like to thank the organizers of all workshops and the program committee members of workshops for their efforts and excellent job, despite working under a very short review cycle. The workshop organizers had hard work to manage workshops on the situation following the COVID-19 outbreak. We also would like to thank all people involved into organizing the COMPSAC 2020 and standing committees for their help, to make COMPSAC 2020 a success.

We hope that the participants of COMPSAC 2020 will enjoy the conference, besides attending the live streamed special plenary speeches and panels.